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In this seventeenth-century map, Jerusalem is depicted as a fairly dense city within a wall, with only a few structures outside. Men in Arab dress stand in small groups conversing with one another in…
The supposed author of Josippon (an account of Jewish history from the Garden of Eden to the destruction of the Second Temple) was Josephus Flavius, though it is now generally believed that the book…
And the work was finished on the eve of Sabbath, in
the month of Shebat, in the year 307, in the great
city of Venice which is under the rule of
the Signoria, may God increase their
glory, and in the…
Born to converso parents and baptized as Manoel Dias Soeiro, Menasseh Ben Israel moved as a boy with his family to Amsterdam, where they reverted openly to Judaism. In 1626, he established the first…
This siddur from Greece contains the prayers of the Romaniote (Greek-speaking Jewish) community of the eastern Mediterranean. It is open at a piyyut (liturgical poem) called “God’s Beloved Daughter,”…
From May through August 1541, the forces of the Ottoman Empire laid siege to the city of Buda (present day Budapest, Hungary) and captured it, ushering in 150 years of Ottoman rule. This illustration…
This flyer calls for the Jewish community to pay a ransom to rescue Jewish captives from the 1686 siege of Buda, which resulted in the capture of the Hungarian city from the Ottoman Empire by armies…
The printing of books: began [lit. “was located”] in the city of Mainz, by a Christian man named Johannes Gutenberg of Strasbourg, and this was in the first year of the pious emperor, Friedrich, in…
This illustration is from Franciscan monk Eugène Roger’s La terre saincte (The Holy Land), a comprehensive study of the Land of Israel which includes dozens of etchings depicting Jewish, Muslim, Druze…
I am astonished to see that for reading just the names of the holy books, one receives his reward, as if he had read and studied them all. If so, then one will not make much of an effort to study…